It’s here: the new cover from Miblart, my incredible design studio in Ukraine, for my upcoming finale: the Realm of Gods.
Just like making the covers for all of my books, it wasn’t an easy road getting here. Part of that is working within the constraints of the series branding in order to achieve something unique and striking, while still fitting in well with the rest of the series–AND setting the bar even higher, because this is the finale (a tall order).
So, we started with the formula we’d established with the first book: a hand of a character in the book, interacting with something interesting, drenched in some mostly monochromatic magic. By the way, I didn’t know that was going to be the series formula when we started–heck, I just put the hand into the Child of Chaos’ cover in order to give some scale to the dice–but it ended up working to distinguish my covers from every other YA fantasy on the shelves.
Given all of the above, I decided to focus on a scene in the book where a boy named Jesper touched some artifacts and transferred power from his hand into the item. He did this with a lot of items, mostly ancient and interesting, so we had some flexibility. And I thought we might show multiple hands (maybe he grabbed it from both side) because, why not? This was the finale. Two hands!
Since the magic from the hand was interacting with a figure within the artifact, I thought I might show a face on my cover for the first time. Here’s the initial sketch I sent to my artists.
Isn’t it fantastic? It looks like the Scream (the famous painting) surrounded by… stuff? Not very inspiring.
Anyway, much of our initial time was trying to figure out what exactly he was holding. What kind of artifact could show a face in it?
They sent back some early exploration, and each version was pretty scary (especially those hands). This direction wasn’t what I was hoping for. Of course, they were just blocking it out and giving me some tools to help visualize where we could go from here. Starting here, the designer and I agreed that a mirror might be the best vehicle to show the face, so we focused on that.
So, here’s something you need to know. I was seriously considering using green magic in this cover, mostly because it provided a good contrast to the other colors on the previous covers. But I had a midnight revelation: if we’re putting a green magic face in a mirror, won’t people immediate think of the Snow White’s mirror-mirror on the wall? I did NOT want people to think this was a fairy tale retelling.
We decided to eliminate the face and here was the result: Miblart’s first real submission.
I was excited to see all of the elements: the title, the series badge with 3 in it, and my name at the bottom declaring I’d written another book (even though I hadn’t yet). That was pretty cool and made this new book feel a little more real.
As to the image, it was pretty. It was interesting. It even had a hint of romanticism–but I didn’t think that was appropriate for this book. It felt more sweet than shocking, so I wanted to try something quite different.
Without giving too much away, I will say that the statues of gods that once resided in the vault make an appearance. One of them is the god of Evil, so I figured I’d give his statue a chance at a cover shot. Watching a hand use magic to reconstruct the statue of the god of Evil sounds like a compelling image, so we gave it a try.
Woah!
This IS what I asked for, but it comes off as horror more than fantasy (although he is the god of Evil, after all). That said, too many people looked at him and commented on the puppet-like mouth. Overall, this image disturbed more than intrigued.
I decided to back off of that direction. Tweaking it was not going to get me where I needed to go.
But the sweet reflection on the mirror lingered in my head. What if the hand in the mirror wasn’t a reflection, or it wasn’t JUST a reflection? I could introduce my other character (a god) just by showing a hand on the other side, something that was being built by the magic from the boy.
Here was the first cut of this idea:
It seemed that the idea had promise, but where I envisioned the hand in the mirror being created from whisps of magic, it was instead being built in chunks. It also wasn’t apparent that it wasn’t an actual reflection. We needed to show some obvious contrast, to ensure that people knew it was different than the boy’s hand.
Now we were getting somewhere. The new texture on the hand made it clear that whoever owned that hand was significantly older than the boy, but it was the addition of the accessories–the ring and the cuff–that truly made it apparent.
The concept was solid. The image was good. Even the color worked. But the overall cover didn’t have as much punch as the other covers in the series. It need more magic pizzazz!
That did it. Magic along the frame, some sparks and cracks, and some additional glows along the boy’s veins (which is part of the story), made this cover come to life.
In every cover in this series, there is that one moment where I open an email from Miblart and, once I see the attached image, I can’t take my eyes from it. It sings to me. We were finally there.
The Realm of Gods, the finale to the Chronicles of Chaos, will launch in early 2024.
And it will be amazing!
The Mysterium 
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